This project will investigate the problems the Austrian government faced in the first half of the nineteenth century in its attempts on the one hand to protect the Habsburg Monarchy against the importation of cholera and plague and, on the other hand, to speed the movement of passengers and merchandise at sea in an era of technological change. Attention will concentrate upon the efforts of the Steam Navigation company of the Austrian Lloyd to gain exemption for its steamships from maritime quarantine legislation at Austrian ports. Attention will also be paid to the thesis that nineteenth-century conservative bureaucrats favored contagionists theories in order to maintain strict quarantines, which they saw as a means of exercising power of the state, whereas liberal groups inclined for economic reasons to anticontagionist theories. To obtain original source materials with which to answer questions raised during preliminary research into the history of the Austrian maritime sanitary code, research will be conducted in archives in Vienna, Austria, and Trieste, Italy.